Middle Smithfield, developers negotiate Big Ridge's fate

Residents are nervous as attorneys for Middle Smithfield Township, Toll Brothers home builders and the Big Ridge development continue to negotiate the home project's future in private.

DAVID PIERCE

Residents are nervous as attorneys for Middle Smithfield Township, Toll Brothers home builders and the Big Ridge development continue to negotiate the home project's future in private.

All three township supervisors are expected to join Middle Smithfield attorneys Nov. 1 when they meet in private with the developers and their lawyers. At stake is the legal status of the north side of Big Ridge, which the township contends was illegally developed by Toll Brothers as a separate, unauthorized housing project.

Toll Brothers insists that its development north of Tom X Road is just another construction phase for Big Ridge, also known as Country Club of the Poconos, under the planned residential development granted preliminary approval by the township in 1988. Big Ridge Developers LP, the current developer of Big Ridge, agrees with Toll.

"We're hoping to meet on Nov. 1 and come to a settlement where all the issues can be resolved," said Supervisors Chairman Scott Schaller.

Home buyers want to make sure their individual ownership claims and financial interests are protected in any negotiated settlement between the parties. Two residential members of the five-person property owners board for the Toll side put their concerns in writing, in a memo to the township.

The township appointed a committee in May 2006 to examine all aspects of its nearly 20-year approval process for Big Ridge. The committee was named following a Pocono Record series that examined title and tax problems in the older, south side of the development.

Attorneys for the two sides have exchanged legal interpretations regarding the north side development in letters going back about a year. None of those letters have been made public. The lawyers also held a few private face-to-face meetings, without the township supervisors who were briefed afterwards about what transpired.

The parties agreed to keep most of those discussions private.

Three residents have voiced concerns in recent weeks about where the negotiations are headed and how it will affect home buyers.

"It is important and critical that the homeowner's interests are foremost in whatever resolution arises out of the negotiations between Middle Smithfield Township and Toll," Toll residents Ray White and Joe Spacarelli wrote in a memo to Josele Cleary, a Lancaster attorney hired by the township to handle the issue.

White and Spacarelli are the two members of the Country Club of the Poconos Community Association — the private property owners board for the Toll side — elected by Toll residents. The other three directors are Toll employees. The two residents said even they, as board members, have been kept in the dark by Toll Brothers.

"These newspaper reports have been the only source of information for the homeowners," they wrote, pointing to stories in the Pocono Record. "At a homeowners meeting earlier this year, one of the Toll directors said that Toll was committed to the community as offered to home buyers. This is all the homeowners have heard from Toll."

Spacarelli and White didn't return e-mails seeking additional comment. But in their memo to the township, they said they want to protect the level of amenities called for in the public offering statement Toll provided to its buyers.

They also said that Toll buyers don't want to be saddled with financial obligations already shouldered by at least some south side buyers through the Country Club of the Poconos Property Owners Association South.

South side buyers are financially responsible for a deteriorating bridge on Big Ridge Drive — the main access road for both south and north residents — and for repair of a decades-old earthen dam for Rakes Pond, near the Big Ridge entrance.

The dam holds back waters for the pond, which was marketed to buyers of a third development — called The Reserves at Pond Creek — as part of its lakefront property.

The Reserves was developed by William A. "Dee" Rake, a member of the Middle Smithfield Township Planning Commission, and Toll Brothers.

Rake also was the original landowner and applicant for the Big Ridge project, and The Reserves property itself was once part of Big Ridge.

Dam and bridge costs to south side residents aren't shared by buyers on the north side or at The Reserves. The two neighboring developments do have a limited fee structure for maintenance of shared common roads.

The two Toll residents warned that any agreement struck by Toll Brothers and the township shouldn't subject north side residents "to unknown and potentially significant financial obligations that were not sufficiently made apparent to Toll buyers at the time of their contract signing."

A south side resident, Maureen McGrath, has concerns of her own that she brought to the township's attention. The three township supervisors privately discussed the Toll situation for nearly an hour Aug. 28, then voted to let McGrath voice her concerns last month in a private meeting with township attorney Cleary at Cleary's Lancaster office.

McGrath was appointed to work with the township committee handling Toll negotiations "to make sure that any settlement that can come from the negotiations can come without further legal repercussions," according to minutes of the township meeting.

McGrath refused comment on what happened during her meeting with Cleary.

"I left confident in the knowledge that the township is in good hands," she wrote in a one-sentence statement, "and that due to attorney-client privilege, the only information you could impart to me was that meetings between the developers and township were ongoing."

Supervisor Schaller agrees that any settlement of the Toll legal issues will have a financial and legal impact on the rest of the housing development. He said the township is trying to address all Big Ridge issues within its jurisdiction.

"There's more to it than just the Toll side," Schaller said. "Toll Brothers is trying to get the township to do a comprehensive settlement and the township has no desire to do that until all the issues are resolved."

Schaller said the supervisors are trying to fix legal problems that none of them had a role in creating. "The prior board left us with quite a mess when it comes to the Big Ridge community," Schaller said. "The current board had nothing to do with the way things are now. ."

Any agreement between the township, Toll Brothers and Big Ridge would have to be approved by the supervisors in a public meeting. Agreement details would have to be aired, and members of the public would have to be given an opportunity to comment on it prior to adoption.